151 Things Some of the Smartest People in the World are Afraid Of

Every year, the online magazine Edge, asks the most brilliant minds of our age a different question. In 2013, the question was: “What Should We Be Worried About?”. Their responses are, of course, based on their years of experience in their fields, their knowledge about the world and the trends they notice happening around the world today. These things, may or may not be widely recognised by the rest of us, but maybe if they’re worried about them, so should we.

Among the people who answered this question about what they’re most afraid of, there were Nobel Prize winners, famous novelists, theoretical physicists, biologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, editors, cosmologists, archaeologists, university professors, and many others.

20. “I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.” –Evgeny Morozov, contributing editor, Foreign Policy

23. “I’ve given up asking questions. l merely float on a tsunami of acceptance of anything life throws at me… and marvel stupidly.” (complete answer)–Terry Gilliam

24. “We should be worried about the new era of Anthropocene—not only as a geological phenomenon, but also as a cultural frame.”–Jennifer Jacquet, clinical assistant professor of environmental studies, NYU

25. Cultural extinction, and the fact that the works of an obscure writer from the Caribbean may not get enough attention. –Hans Ulrich Obrist. curator, Serptine Gallery

27. That we will stop dying. –Kate Jeffery, professor of behavioural neuroscience

28. That there are an infinity of universes out there, but that we are only able to study the one we live in. –Lawrence M. Krauss, physicist/cosmologist

29. The rise of anti-intellectualism and the end of progress. “We’ve now, for the first time, got a single global civilization. If it fails, we all fail together.” –Tim O’Reilly, CEO and founder of O’Reilly Media

30. We should worry about several “modern” States that, in practical terms, are shaped by crime; States in which bills and laws are promulgated by criminals and, even worse, legitimized through formal and “legal” democracy. – Eduardo Salcedo-albaran, Colombian philosopher

31. “We should worry that so much of our science and technology still uses just five main models of probability—even though there are more probability models than there are real numbers.” –Bart Kosko, information scientist

32. “It is possible that we are rare, fleeting specks of awareness in an unfeeling cosmic desert, the only witnesses to its wonder. It is also possible that we are living in a universal sea of sentience, surrounded by ecstasy and strife that is open to our influence. Sensible beings that we are, both possibilities should worry us.” Timo Hannay, publisher

33. Men. –Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist

34. The social media-fication of science writing. –Michael I. Norton, Harvard Business School prof

63. “As someone fairly committed to the death of our solar system and ultimately the entropy of the universe, I think the question of what we should worry about is irrelevant in the end.” –Bruce Hood, mondo-bummer

64. A scarcity of water resources. –Giulio Boccaletti, physicist

image via huffingtonpost.com

65. That we “are inarticulately lost in Modernity. Many of us seem to sense the end of something, perhaps a futile meaninglessness in our Modernity.” — Stuart A. Kauffman, professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy

66. “ I worry about the lost opportunity of denying the world’s teenagers access to education.” Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

67. Augmented reality. –William Poundstone, journalist.

68. That big data and new media will mean the end of facts. –Victoria Stodden, computational legal scholar, statistics professor

69. That we will spend too much time on social media. –Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist

71. That the gap between news and understanding is widening. –Gavin Schmidt, NASA climatologist

72. “I worry we have yet to have a conversation about what seems to be a developing “new normal” about the presence of screens in the playroom and kindergarten” –Sherry Turkle, pshcyhologist, MIT

73. “That we will become irrationally impatient with science” –Stuart Firestein, professor who is working as hard as he can, dammit

74. That we will get our hopes up for interstellar space travel, because it’s not going to happen. –Ed Regis, science writer

75. That global cooperation is failing and we don’t know why. –Daniel Haun

76. That we worry too much. –Joel Gold, psychiatrist

77. “I worry more and more about what will happen to the generations of children who don’t have the uniquely human gift of a long, protected, stable childhood.” –Alison Gopnik

78. That synthetic biology will spiral out of control. –Seirian Summer, lecturer in behavioral biology

79. The death of mathematics. –Keith Devlin, mathematician

80. That we will outsource too many skills to machines. –Susan Blackmore, psychologist

81. “We should be worried about online silos. They make us stupid and hostile toward each other.” –Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

82. That we worry too much. –Gary Klein, scientist at MacroCognition

83. That the human species will lose the will to survive. –Dave Winer, Blogging and RSS software pioneer

84. The surplus of testosterone caused by a gender gap in China. –Robert Kurzban, psychologist

85. “A worry that is not yet on the scientific or cultural agenda is neural data privacy rights” –Melanie Swan, systems-level thinker, futurist

86. Armageddon. –Timothy Taylor, archaeologist

87. There’s nothing to worry about, even though the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t turned up any new discoveries. –Amanda Gefter, editor

88. “What I worry most about is that we are more and more losing the formal and informal bridges between different intellectual, mental and humanistic approaches to seeing the world.” –AntonZeilinger, physicist

93. That we do not understand the dynamics of our emerging global culture. –Kirsten Bomblies, assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology

94. “We should worry about losing lust as the guiding principle for the reproduction of our species.” –Tor Norretranders, science writer

95. That we worry too much, but about fictional violence. –Jonathan Gottschall, English professor

96. “We should be worried about the consequences of our increasing knowledge of what causes disease, and its consequences for human freedom” –Esther Dyson, Catalyst, Information Tech Startups

97. Natural death. –Antony Garrett Lisi, theoretical physicist

98. “What worries me is that the debate about gender differences still seems to polarize nature vs. nurture, with some in the social sciences and humanities wanting to assert that biology plays no role at all, apparently unaware of the scientific evidence to the contrary” — Simon Baron-Cohen, psychologist

100. The Unavoidable Intrusion Of Sociopolitical Forces Into Science. –Nicholas A Christakis, physician

101. “I am worried about who gets to be players in the science game—and who is left out.” –Stephon H. Alexander, physicist

102. “The fact that so many people choose to live in ways that narrow the community of fate to a very limited set of others and to define the rest as threatening to their way of life and values is deeply worrying because this contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable them to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies—local, national, and international—and to elude their own role in creating long-term threats to their own wellbeing and that of others.” –Margaret Levi, political scientist

117. “We should be worried about how we go about finding the wisdom to allow us to navigate developments as we begin to improve our ability to cheaply print human tissue, grow synthetic brains, have robots take care of our old parents, let the Internet educate our children” –Luca De Biase, journalist

118. That genomics may fail us when it comes to mental disorders. –Terrence J. Sejnowski, computational neuroscientist

119. “What really keeps me awake at night is that we face a crisis within the deepest foundations of physics. The only way out seems to involve profound revision of fundamental physical principles.” –Steve Giddings, theoretical physicist

120. “The most worrying aspect of our society is the low index of suspicion that we have about the behavior of normal people.” –Karl Sabbagh, writer, TV producer

121. “Many people worry that there is not enough democracy in the world; I worry that we might never go beyond democracy.” –Dylan Evans, CEO of Projection Point

122. Not population growth, but prosperity growth—the prospect of the entire world consuming resources like Americans and Westerners do. –Laurence C. Smith, geography professor

130. That we won’t have enough robots to do all the jobs we’ll need them to do in coming decades. –Rodney A. Brooks, roboticist

131. That we will have no Plan B when the internet inevitably breaks down. –George Dyson, science historian

132. The Singularity. That we “are curiously complacent about life as we know it getting transformed. What we should be worried about is that we’re not worried.” –Max Tegmark, MIT physicist

133. “There are known knowns and known unknowns, but what we should be worried about most is the unknown unknowns.” –Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist

134. That the brain is unable to conceive of our most serious problems. –Daniel Goleman, psychologist

135. “We should be worried that scientists have given up the search for determining right and wrong and which values lead to human flourishing just as the research tools for doing so are coming online” –Michael Shermer, publisher, Skeptic magazine